Sales of 1984 soar after ‘alternative facts’ blunder

Readers made link between Trump adviser’s comments and the book, publisher says

George Orwell’s classic book 1984, about a dystopian future where critical thought is suppressed under a totalitarian regime, has seen a surge in sales this month, rising to the top of the Amazon bestseller list in the United States and Canada, and leading its publisher to have tens of thousands of new copies printed.

Craig Burke, the publicity director at Penguin USA, said the publisher had ordered 75,000 new copies of the book this week and was considering another reprint.

“We’ve seen a big bump in sales,” Burke said, adding that the rise “started over the weekend and hit hyperactive” Tuesday and Wednesday morning. Since Friday, the book has reached a 9,500-per-cent increase in sales, he said.

He said demand began to lift Sunday, shortly after the interview that Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, gave on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Defending a false claim by White House press secretary Sean Spicer that Trump had attracted the “largest audience ever to witness an inauguration,” Conway used a phrase that struck some as similar to 1984’ s dystopian world. When asked on Meet the Press why Spicer had said something provably false, Conway replied, “Don’t be so dramatic.” Spicer, she said, “gave alternative facts.”

In the novel, the term “newspeak” refers to language in which independent thought, or “unorthodox” political ideas, have been eliminated. “Doublethink” is defined as “reality control.”

On social media and elsewhere Sunday, the book’s readers made a connection between Conway’s comments and Orwell’s language, and the attention on the book “kind of took a life of its own,” Burke said.

The dictionary publisher Merriam-- Webster described the interview as “fraught with epistemological tension.”

The dictionary also reported that searches for the word “fact” spiked after Conway’s comments.

Stefan Collini, a professor of intellectual history and an expert on Orwell at the University of Cambridge, said readers see a natural parallel between the book and the way Trump and his staff have distorted facts.

“Everyone remembers 1984 as containing various parodies of official distortions,” he said. “That kind of unreality that is propagated as reality is what people feel reminded of, and that’s why they keep coming back.”